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Square USA to shut its doors

The company that brought us the movie "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" is closing up shop on March 31. The studio that created the movie, Square USA (see Hannibal's interview here), did not recoup enough money from ticket and DVD sales to cover the film's $145 million price tag.

The movie was the fourth-highest-earning film when it was released in theaters, but it slid after that, taking in $32 million in the United States and $72 million abroad.

A DVD of the movie, in which sequences can be viewed from several angles and some scenes can be rearranged by the viewer, was released in October and was the top-selling DVD in the nation for a time.

Though DVD sales remained strong, it still was not enough to save the company. Even with groundbreaking work, a spot in the industry isn't guaranteed until a genuine "hit" is on hand. It is sad that the cast of computer generated stars will themselves be "cast aside". While Square USA may have had the CGI down, they lacked a solid story-line to compete with works from PDT/Dreamworks and Pixar. Let's hope Square can find some partners so their work will not go to waste.